IBM is spending more than a billion dollars to build data centers overseas to reassure foreign customers that their information is safe from prying eyes in the United States government.

And tech companies abroad, from Europe to South America, say they are gaining customers that are shunning United States providers, suspicious because of the revelations by Edward J. Snowden that tied these providers to the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance program.

Right. Because, as we all know, European governments did not fully comply with the US spying programs, nor have they similar programs of their own.

High time some smart company develops a very simple and straightforward 'personal cloud'; a simple, large box with loads of storage that you dump in the basement somewhere, with pre-configured email, internet storage, and so on. Also offer the ability to have multiple of these things tied to the same account for data duplication, so you can, say, dump one of them at a trusted friend's home. Make it platform-agnostic and encrypted, et voila.